DeRay Mckesson is tired. He tweeted he’d been “cursed to sit next to the drunk man” flying back from the West Coast as he wrapped up a five-week, 22-stop, cross-country book tour. Arriving at Ida B’s Table for a morning interview and photo shoot, the 33-year-old activist is punctual and polite, but his distinctive, high-pitched voice is softer than usual. Nonetheless, he’s ready to discuss his role in the Black Lives Matter movement and his recent call-to-action memoir, On the Other Side of Freedom: The Case for Hope. Brief recap: Mckesson garnered national attention live-tweeting the Ferguson, Missouri, marches following the killing of Michael Brown Jr. by a white police officer, and he checked in at No. 11 (along with fellow protestor Johnetta Elzie) on Fortune’s list of the “World’s Greatest Leaders” in 2015.

Jet-lagged or not, Mckesson cogently breaks down the structural racism that plagues cities such as Ferguson and Baltimore, as well as the foundational ideas that built and sustained that inequality. That preternatural ability to communicate—with composure and conciseness—is how the Baltimore native became an overnight cable news go-to.

“When we think about white privilege, it is the recognition that people benefit from things that they personally did not work for,” he begins, addressing a subject covered on his book tours. “When we think about white supremacy, it is the idea that white is better, that white is the norm, is the standard, that it is more worthy. And then, we think about ‘whiteness,’ and it is the culture that idea births.”

On the road, Mckesson was interviewed by the likes of MC Hammer, former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau, and The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah. He has a million-plus followers on Twitter, has hosted celebrities from John Legend to Katy Perry on his weekly show, Pod Save the People, and he gets invited to parties by Beyoncé. But here’s the weird thing: While Mckesson was born here and lives here, he draws only a small crowd to his book signing later tonight at Baltimore Soundstage.

“I don’t mean this in a good or bad way, I just don’t come across him,” says Sean Yoes, Baltimore AFRO editor and author of Baltimore After Freddie Gray: Real Stories from One of America’s Great Imperiled Cities. He may be a national civil rights figure, but Mckesson is not a conspicuous presence in Baltimore two years after his bid for the city’s highest office. “Maybe I’m just in my own lane—I hadn’t thought about him in months, at least,” Yoes continues. “He’s kind of in a no-man’s land here.”

The protests in Ferguson after Michael Brown’s death began a little more than four years ago, but it is easy to forget the timeline, the details, and the next 400 days of activism that helped set the stage for the uprising in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray. Several days after officer Darren Wilson’s shooting of Brown in August 2014, Mckesson, then a 29-year-old Minneapolis public school administrator, headed to Missouri to see the unfolding situation for himself. He live-tweeted his mundane drive to his then-modest 800 followers while also seeking a sofa to sleep on once he reached Ferguson. The second night he was there, police tear-gassed demonstrators. “That was the moment I became a protestor,” he says.

In collaboration with Elzie and Brittany Packnett, both St. Louis-area natives, Mckesson took to social media to document the confrontations with the Ferguson police department’s militarized response. They also used their online platforms to launch the Ferguson Protestor Newsletter, which became both a resource for—and an alternative to—the establishment media, which they saw misrepresenting the protests as violent.

Identifiable in his ubiquitous royal blue Patagonia vest, which he basically has not taken it off since, Mckesson became the most recognizable face of the Black Lives Matter movement. In fact, the vest remains so intertwined with his political brand that it has its own Twitter handle.

After Ferguson, Mckesson joined similar protests in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, following the death of Alton Sterling; New York following the death of Eric Garner; North Charleston, South Carolina, following the shooting of Walter Scott; and Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray. (In one memorable interview here, he repeatedly pushed back against CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, who tried to get a patient Mckesson to condemn the behavior of protestors. “You are suggesting this idea that broken windows are worse than broken spines,” Mckesson responded.) Since then, along with Packnett and policy analyst and data scientist Samuel Sinyangwe, Mckesson helped create the police reform initiative Campaign Zero and its associated website, mappingpoliceviolence.org, which tracks the people killed by police in the U.S. “The numbers are flat, not down at all,” he notes, with a mixture of frustration and disbelief.

As he chronicles in some of the best chapters of his book, Mckesson was born in West Baltimore, later moving with his father, a recovering drug addict, and his sister to Catonsville. It was in Catonsville, he says, that he first became aware of poverty and the inequity in education.

After college at Bowdoin in Maine, he taught in New York City through Teach for America before returning to Baltimore for three years to work for a nonprofit after-school educational initiative and the city school system. He then spent 16 months in Minneapolis as senior director of human capital for their school system before leaving for Ferguson. He has received death threats and has been sued by police officers. In turn, he has sued Fox News and commentator Jeanine Pirro for alleging he incited violence. Along the way, the Obama White House invited him to a policy discussion, and he joined the speaking roster at Creative Artists Agency, whose clients include Joe Biden and Will Smith. Oh, and he gave commencement speeches at The New School and the Maryland Institute College of Art. In other words, it has been a roller coaster.

“You are suggesting this idea that broken windows are worse than broken spines.”

As the threats and lawsuits attest, Mckesson has also become a lightning rod. Much of the fire directed his way derives from mere hate from the other side. But there has been—and remains—resentment and criticism among those who normally would be considered allies. Broadly, the accusation is that he raced in front of cameras and put himself forward as a spokesman for a movement he did not begin.

Kaysonya Wise Whitehead, a Loyola University professor who teaches a course on the Black Lives Matter movement and hosts a current events program on WEAA, is not a Mckesson fan. “Black Lives Matter is a social movement, a civil rights movement, and it’s a slogan—it is something to stick on the bumper of car,” Whitehead says. “It’s all those things. But the people who created the hashtag and pushed it forward have been scrambling to get in front of it ever since. The fact that the white media rallies around someone does not make him or her a leader. Has DeRay been a leader on these issues locally? No, it’s The Algebra Project, Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, Baltimore Bloc, Pleasant Hope Baptist Church, among many others, that’s been doing the work.”

Mckesson’s last-minute entry into the Baltimore mayoral race in 2016—an announcement made in coordination with The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Guardian—gave detractors additional fuel.

“It’s one thing to be able to show up to an event in a major mainstream media moment,” Dayvon Love, public policy director for Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, told Slate after Mckesson’s announcement. “It’s a different thing to get people from Baltimore to go to Annapolis for a hearing on police reform on a Tuesday at 1 in the afternoon.”

“It was opportunistic,” Anthony McCarthy, a former spokesman for the past three Baltimore mayors, says of Mckesson’s bid. “There was already one of the strongest fields in a long time.” That said, Mckesson did receive support from Morgan State professor Lawrence Brown, who is at work on a book about Baltimore’s history of segregation and housing discrimination. “What have those other establishment candidates accomplished?” Brown argues, suggesting an outsider is needed to bring real change to City Hall.

Mckesson, who received 2 percent of the vote, takes exception to the criticism. He highlights the year he spent opening and overseeing a West Baltimore after-school center with the nonprofit Higher Achievement and leadership roles when he was a Catonsville High School student with the city’s Safe & Sound Campaign and the grant-making nonprofit Youth As Resources. “For all this talk about ‘ending the gatekeepers,’ there are places where people’s identity is rooted in deciding who is and who isn’t able to do [activism] work, and Baltimore is one of those places,” he says.

This past election season, he stirred more controversy by endorsing fellow Teach for America alum J.D. Merrill, son-in-law to former Mayor Martin O’Malley, over longtime Baltimore civil rights leader Jill Carter for a seat in the state Senate (Carter won). Meanwhile, Mckesson says he doesn’t know if he’ll run for office again or how long he’ll stay in Baltimore. Current plans revolve around his national podcast and Campaign Zero, which he says will be publishing new data soon about police complaints and police union contracts.

Erin Hodge-Williams, former executive director of the nonprofit Higher Achievement, has known Mckesson since he was a teenage youth organizer. “He pours himself into everything he does,” Hodge-Williams says. “The traction he got [after Ferguson] surprised me, but I think the blue vest, for example, is ingenious. Is it branding? Yes,” she continues. “But I think it’s brilliant. Trump is on Twitter all the time stirring up nonsense. DeRay strategizes how to make his voice heard, too, but that’s because he wants to talk about policing and prison reform and social justice. He stays true to his message, and that makes all the difference in the world.”

Whether it makes a difference in Baltimore may be another matter.

On the Other Side of Freedom: The Case for Hope

DeRay Mckesson (Viking)

Fours years after a white police officer killed unarmed teen Michael Brown Jr. in Ferguson, Missouri, DeRay Mckesson takes readers inside the compelling, 400-days-long, in-the-streets response that inspired Black Lives Matter protests around the country. An activist in the ongoing civil rights movement and the host of the popular podcast Pod Save the People, Mckesson presents an intimate portrait of his experience growing up as the son of former addicts in West Baltimore, the context of the strained relationship between police and the black community in many cities, and optimism for the future. A former teacher, Mckesson knows his history and paints a way forward.

Liza Jane & the Dragon

Laura Lippman (Black Sheep/Akashic Books)

The New York Times best-selling author Laura Lippman’s foray into the arena of children’s literature is delightful and yet manages to maintain the author’s quirky sense of humor. In this tale, a little girl named Liza Jane fires her parents and hires a dragon to take their place . . . until she realizes the dragon has only one tactic for solving problems: breathing fire. Late to school? Set the secretary’s desk on fire. Pizza delivery man got delayed? A fiery blast to his car. The picture book is illustrated by Maryland painter Kate Samworth, who brings the characters to life and gives us visual clues for reading this story in a broader context. While this story is a fun romp through what might be the occasional daydream of many children, it also serves as a political allegory. The dragon has a familiar blond mane that swoops between his two horns.

Read our full interview with writer Laura Lippman.

A town hall featuring 100 black men in Baltimore, some prominent and familiar—others less often heard, but no less compelling and thoughtful—discuss everything from President Donald Trump and Colin Kaepernick to fatherhood, police reform, and the challenges facing black boys in the first episode of new series Take on America, airing tonight from OZY Media.

“Black Men in Baltimore,” hosted by award-winning journalist and OZY Media co-founder Carlos Watson and including Jemele Hill, formerly of ESPN and now of The Atlantic, is the first of four televised town halls that “take on America” through the lens of race.

Upcoming episodes include “White Women in Nashville” (airing October 25), “Latino Families in New York City” (airing November 1), and “Asian-American Millennials in San Francisco” (airing November 8). The series—which debuts tonight at 8 p.m. on YouTube, OZY.com, and a variety of PBS stations around the country—aims to generate dialogue that can help Americans understand each other better, and foster “greater insight and understanding at a critical time.”

Among the panelists in the Baltimore episode, filmed earlier this month at the War Memorial building, are Maryland Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ben Jealous, Republican U.S. Senate candidate and Towson University professor Tony Campbell, Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson, The Wire actor Lawrence Gillard Jr., journalist and author D. Watkins and T.J. Smith, who recently resigned from the Baltimore Police Department after expressing his frustration with the struggling department.

It also features a good number of men most Baltimoreans likely don’t know—local business leaders, nonprofit directors, scholars, organizers, artists, and barbers among them—who care no less deeply about their state of their city and country.

The debut episode features candid, and at times emotional, conversations around the ongoing challenges facing black men in the U.S. today as well as revealing personal stories. Smith, for example, admits that even as a police officer he’s been the target of racial profiling and wrongfully stopped while driving and shopping.

The most moving segments of the episode, not surprisingly, come when the men talk about the obstacles their own fathers and mothers encountered in raising them and the twin trauma of poverty and violence all too common today in many Baltimore neighborhoods.

Politics and pressing issues, such as the continued War on Drugs, mandatory minimum sentencing, and voter suppression efforts—all of which disproportionately affect minority communities—are never far from the discussion, however. Nor are wide-ranging opinions on the best way forward.

With racial tensions running high in the era of President Trump and the run up to the mid-term elections, the aim of the town hall, and the series, according to OZY Media, “is to see how, in today’s incredibly tense political climate, we’re actually more alike than different in our strive for progress, and for outsiders to get an inside look at the conversations these minority groups are really having.”

“I feel passionately that we are at pivotal moment in our nation’s history,” said Watson, the series host in a statement. “We are living in one of the most racially charged eras since the Civil Rights movement, and the world is both more connected technologically, and disconnected interpersonally, than it’s ever-been before. We hope that we will create a forum for substantive dialogue and ultimately inform and inspire action.”

On the other hand, some questionable tactics during the election season have continued today. One example is the slashing of 3rd District City Council candidate Ryan Dorsey’s tires this morning, which he discovered at 4:30 a.m. as he was starting his day.

“Thankfully, I have some great neighbors who were willing to help me with transportation,” Dorsey said while greeting voters outside Northwood Elementary. “I have had signs slashed and stolen as well during this entire campaign. Big signs, too. Not just the small yard signs that are easily pulled up.”

In Bolton Hill, windshield fliers headed “Press Release,” with no address or name attached, claimed that former Mayor Dixon, who was forced to resign during her term because of theft and perjury charges, was “set up” by political opponents.

And at Catherine Pugh’s campaign headquarters, the windshield of a van that belonged to her campaign was smashed and its tires slashed, and another van was damaged after part-time campaign workers, expecting to be paid, were told they wouldn’t be needed today, according to reporting by The Sun.

There were also reports of campaign polling places opening late Tuesday, struggles at some venues with the return to paper but scanned ballots, and finally, a shortage of “I Voted” stickers.

Six of the current 15 City Council members declined this year to seek re-election, including longtime legislators Robert Curran, Helen Holton, and Rochelle “Ricki” Spector, all whom are retiring. First District Councilman Jim Kraft gave up his seat to run for judge, and fellow members Carl Stokes and Nick Mosby gave up their seats to campaign for mayor, although Mosby recently dropped out of the race and endorsed Pugh.

Along with efforts to fill those vacancies, 9th District Councilman William “Pete” Welch, who was initially appointed to the seat by his mother, former Councilwoman Agnes Welch, is expected to face a strong challenge from 37-year-old John Bullock, a Towson University assistant professor of government. Bill Henry, the 4th District city councilman, faces a credible challenge from 35-year-old Brian Hammock, a CSX executive.

In the 13th District, 35-year-old Shannon Sneed, who lost to Councilman Warren Branch by 43 votes in the last election, is running again. And, in the 11th District, Councilman Eric Costello, whose appointment to his seat was supported by Council President Jack Young, faces three credible challengers.

Hardly of lesser importance, Baltimore voters will also choose between Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary. Sanders drew a big and enthusiastic crowd to the Royal Farms Arena Saturday, but Clinton maintains a sizable lead in Maryland in the latest polling.

On the Republican side, all three candidates, real estate developer Donald Trump, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich held rallies in the Maryland in the last week, but Trump maintains a large lead in the latest polling.

Baltimore voters, meanwhile, are also expected to play a key role deciding between Prince George’s Rep. Donna Edwards and Montgomery County Rep. Chris Van Hollen in the Democratic primary race to replace Fells Point native and Maryland stalwart Mikulski, whose groundbreaking political career will come to end early next year.

The Republican primary for Mikulski’s long-held seat hasn’t received the same attention—the GOP is out-registered 2-1 in the state—but that field includes Baltimore County Del. Kathy Szeliga, Richard Douglas, a former George W. Bush Defense Department appointee from Bladensburg, and Chrys Kefalas, who worked in former Gov. Robert Ehrlich’s administration, from East Baltimore’s Greektown.

St. Mary’s College of Maryland political science professor Todd Eberly says in two of the big races today—the Baltimore mayoral race and the Democratic U.S. Senate primary—Pugh and Van Hollen have become the frontrunners, but he wouldn’t be completely surprised if the elections go the other way.

“Edwards ran an attack ad recently that portrayed Van Hollen as soft on guns and the NRA and that backfired,” Eberly said. “But until then, it was very close between them. In the other race, Sheila Dixon has a strong core of supporters and I think that race remains combustible, with a lot of undecided voters. I would not be shocked if she won. Stranger things have happened.”